Cortisol, Low Testosterone

00:00 Del, podcast, I am pleased to have Dr. Pete on with me again today. So I don’t think he needs any introduction, but I will give a slight introduction. And those of you who have not familiarized yourself yet with Dr. Raymond Pete, you can check him out at r-a-y-p-e-a-t dot com. And we’re going to be talking today about testosterone and high cortisol. And you know, I wanted to touch on this because we’re seeing a lot, or at least I am seeing a lot in my nutrition practice of clients coming in with their blood work and having too high of cortisol and too low of testosterone, even women. So I think it’s a pretty important topic and I wanted to ask what I consider, in my opinion, the leading authority in health and wellness, since he’s been teaching now, and probably, well, I would say learning and teaching for how many years, Dr. Pete, altogether. As early as 1960, when I was doing it independently, then I concentrated on the hormones between 1968 01:07 and 72 when I got my Ph.D. Yeah, I know you’ve taught at many numerous schools, the University of Oregon or Banna College, Montana State University, the Natural College of Naturopathic Medicine, and you’ve even taught internationally and Mexico as well. So I mean, since I consider you the leading authority based on everybody that I’ve looked into over the years to try to get my information from and as a nutritionist, I find that yours is the most logical and the most backed with science. So I really appreciate all that you’ve taught me so far and I know my listeners will really benefit from this podcast too. So I want to talk to you specifically about low testosterone and high cortisol, kind of a tag team of symptoms I’m seeing, and I want you to fill my listeners in on why this might be happening. Maybe you’ve seen it kind of come to fruition too. And maybe there’s some listening out there that have some of the symptoms that I wanted you to touch on with regard to it as well. So could you talk about why maybe cortisol is so high in so many people right now and 02:11 the sex hormones basically are down? Well, it isn’t the sex hormones as a group because estrogen rises when you’re under stress along with cortisol. And when the androgens in general decrease, that usually goes with a decrease of progesterone. And that creates a susceptibility to stress. And everything harmful practically will increase both your estrogen and cortisol. And the first barrier to harm is the group of steroids, progenitalin, progesterone, DHEA and testosterone. All of these have broadly overlapping protective effects that protect your energy apparatus, 03:19 your sensory apparatus, keep things stable and working. And injury simply doesn’t happen when you have a great abundance of those things. You can run a marathon or swim in ice water, do all sorts of things that could kill a more fragile person. But if you’re really well supplied with progenitalin and its derivatives down to testosterone, you’ve got endurance so you don’t experience stress. When something happens that you’re not abundantly producing the protective steroids, then any 04:19 little thing becomes stressful. Just walking can be a stress. If you’re eating harder, you will shift over to the lactic acid metabolism with increasing age or malnutrition. Anything that interferes with the production of these protective steroids makes you then shift over to the emergency production of cortisol. And all of these protective steroids block the effect of cortisol so that you can take a cortisol pill or a prednisone or whatever and have very little harm from it. But if you’re fairly saturated with progesterone, DHEA, testosterone, because they’re preventing 05:26 the action as well as taking care of some of the things that cortisol would produce. For example, cortisol maintains your blood sugar level so that you can keep working. But it does it by converting your protein-y tissues, muscles, skin, thymus gland, lymphatic tissues in general, and finally, the digestive system, liver and intestine will be cannibalized to make sugar in the energy under the influence of cortisol. The protective effect of testosterone was demonstrated once using radioactive testosterone molecules that they injected into athletes and thought that they would see radiation 06:31 coming out of their muscles. But what they saw was that most of the radiation was coming from their heart. Testosterone is most concentrated in the organs that are most vital to survival. So it concentrates in the heart, lungs, and brain at the highest ratio to protein. Even though it’s responsible for making an athlete’s muscles bigger and bigger under the influence of testosterone, what it’s doing is preventing those being used up for energy. So with age, if you’re producing less of the protective steroids, a given amount of cortisol might not look extremely high in relation to the standards. But if you’re pregnant on progesterone, DHEA, and testosterone are lower than average, 07:35 even a moderate amount of cortisol begins eating up your muscles and skin, and eventually it can start deteriorating your heart, lungs, and brain. I wanted to come back to the athlete kind of mentality of low testosterone and high cortisol because I think that’s really important to talk about too. But you had said something that kind of made me question, like, is it the chicken or the egg? Like, is it a high cortisol response that leads to things like low progesterone, low testosterone, or is it something happening that causes the low progesterone and low testosterone and leads to the stress response of high cortisol? It’s usually a gradual deterioration from poor nutrition or eating foods that are irritating or toxic, or things that, for example, foods that suppress your thyroid function. 08:37 Thyroid is necessary to produce these protective steroids. Cholesterol is converted pretty massively in the pregnant loan and the other protective steroids if you have vitamin A and thyroid hormone adequately. But if you’re deficient in either of those, the cholesterol will rise in your blood. That generally means that you’re not making enough DHEA and testosterone, for example. So low thyroid, which causes high cholesterol, the real meaning of that is that you’re not making enough of the protective testosterone and related steroids. And when that happens, your cortisol and other stress hormones rise. So low thyroid is the most common thing responsible for a bad ratio of cortisol to testosterone. 09:45 Well, that makes complete sense. And so then leading into, like, whether it’s the bad foods or the thyroid being a result of poor nutrition, as you say, too, could it also be like the athletes we were talking about, maybe over-training, over-exercising that can also lead to this, like just too much chronic output that’s stressing the body in a physical manner? Yeah, someone did an experiment putting people on a treadmill and measuring their active thyroid hormone, T3, and they kept their pulse rate at 120 beats per minute or less, just very mild walking on the treadmill. And in an hour, they had become hypothyroid in the sense of reducing their activation of thyroid in the T3. But doctors are now being taught that they should ignore T3, the active hormone, 10:48 and think about only thyroid-stimulating hormone, TSH, and only Cyroxin or T4. But when you’re an athlete, for example, is suppressing their T3, Cyroxin will actually rise in a reaction. And so doctors are being taught things that will make them necessarily miss the effects of stress on your thyroid, and that leads to misinterpretation of everything down the street. For example, when your thyroid goes down from stress, your estrogen normally is being excreted and kept at a low level, systemically, by the thyroid activating liver metabolism, the liver solubilizes estrogen, making it leave through the kidneys and be excreted. 11:51 If your thyroid drops from stress, very quickly your estrogen rope will rise, and then the estrogen activates directly on the adrenals, it increases cortisol production, and many other levels that activates your pituitary to stimulate cortisol production from the adrenals, and it activates your brain in many different ways through the corticotropic release factor, CRH, to activate the adrenals and pituitary. So just dropping the active thyroid, do you very quickly turn on both the estrogen and the whole cortisol stress system? And I would assume someone who is looking to put on muscle and maybe an athlete that’s looking to train for an event, 12:53 they’re not going to want excess estrogen. And so that study you were saying is like they were just walking and T3 was reduced. And so imagine these people, are you familiar, Dr. Pete, with CrossFit? Yeah, intense over exertion. The reshums were 50 or 60 years ago being accused of using testosterone because they had worked out the way to under train, avoid over exertion, and so keep their stress hormones down and their cortisol up. It takes really a very moderate amount of muscle building exercise to increase testosterone and lower cortisol. The muscle itself becomes an endocrine organ in a constructed sense. If you’re under stress, your muscle will actually produce cortisol and not testosterone. When it’s properly stimulated, the muscle becomes a testosterone, a producing organ. 14:02 It isn’t just the gonads that produce testosterone if you’re doing things right. So pretty much this chronic output of these CrossFit classes they’re going to and heavy lifting or heavy duty weight training and things like that. A woman doing just one or two minutes of mild dumbbell lifts and a few squats for the big leg muscles can shift her balance from cortisol to testosterone. And it just takes a measure two or three times a day whatever it takes to increase the muscle mass. It’s really a very small amount of muscle lifting type exercise. So that’s good to know. It is beneficial to lift heavy things but we don’t need to do these hour long CrossFit classes 15:03 that are pushing your body to the limit and doing it every day kind of thing instead of creating muscle building you’re actually inducing a cortisol response, yes? Yes. So that’s really, I’m glad we’re talking about this because I think there’s a mentality out there that more is better so if lifting heavy things is good I should lift it all the time and strain my body and stress my body. But the people that I’ve seen that exercise the most like my clients that have exercised the most they’re the ones that I’m seeing with high sex hormone binding globulin and low testosterone. So can you talk a little bit about sex hormone binding globulin if I can say that word right? I think that is the body’s defense against estrogen. When it’s high a woman has a lower risk of breast cancer because it keeps the estrogen out of cells. It actually tends to pull estrogen out of cells protectively. 16:04 But when it’s high in response depending against estrogen it can also interfere with testosterone effect. So you mentioned a little bit of how cortisol and estrogen are related but there’s another kind of player in all of this too that we should talk about which is adrenaline like are they all intertwined together as far as adrenaline and cortisol and estrogen too? Yeah all of the stress hormones interfere with the conversion of T4 to T3 and in fact instead of making the effective respiration promoting T3 they convert tyroxin into reverse T3. They dispose of the precursor and turn it into an interfering inactive suppressor of respiration. 17:05 And those same stress hormones that produce the inactive blocking reverse T3 also tend to suppress the pituitary TSH making it look like you’re even hyperthyroid because doctors are taught to diagnose hyperthyroidism in terms of abnormally low TSH but in fact the stress which is lowering most people’s TSH is causing the hyperthyroidism and is caused by hyperthyroidism. So a low thyroid person raises their estrogen cortisol and adrenaline and these add up to lower your TSH and make it look like you have too much thyroid 18:11 according to the way doctors are being indoctrinated. And so that would be why so many people go to the doctor and say well you’re actually you have too much thyroid going on but yet the person is exhibiting all the signs of low thyroid such as weight gain and hair loss and energy loss but yet the doctor is seeing it on the other end right? Yeah for 65 years it’s been known how it works but doctors are increasingly misinformed. I don’t know what the real power for this is but the indoctrination has become more intense than just the last two or three years telling doctors don’t look at T3 even just look at TSH and don’t worry even if the TSH is as high as 10 which is dangerous, it’s horribly toxic. TSH itself is an inflammation promoting hormone. 19:16 Even if a person isn’t hypothyroid in the sense of not having enough T3 if their TSH is increased they will get the worst heart disease signs of hypothyroidism. Part of the disease effects of hypothyroidism are really an excess of TSH rather than the direct lack of metabolic stimulation from T3. Yeah and I definitely want to do a whole podcast on thyroid with you because I think that’s so fascinating with regard to how stress affects the thyroid and then conversely how the thyroid affects everything else. But as far as talking about weight gain like I don’t think people understand the importance of women having testosterone 20:17 the right adequate testosterone I think we always think of it as a male hormone but women really need testosterone as well and what I see is with low testosterone and women they do have this additional weight gain which I’m assuming is because conversely they’re also experiencing high estrogen but can you talk about the importance of a good amount of testosterone for women and not just men? It has to be balanced both in men and women. It has to be balanced with DHEA and cortisol and normally it is unless you’re supplementing it as a drug but all of these especially the DHEA is an activator of fat oxidizing and your muscle is the organ that is most equipped for oxidizing fat. Your brain and heart don’t do well oxidizing fat compared to glucose 21:24 and the muscles are perfectly adapted for burning fat and everything you do to increase your muscles production of testosterone and reduction of cortisol is favoring that fat burning So just the right amount of exercise to build muscle will shift your metabolism to safely consume fat in your muscles while leaving adequate glucose for your brain and heart and lungs. And so like weight gain is probably one of the symptoms of low testosterone could you talk some other symptoms that people might see if cortisol is high and testosterone is low? Depression, the whole stress system that ends up increasing your cortisol and decreasing DHEA progesterone and testosterone 22:26 that whole system is related to the inflammatory and degenerative processes and depression is how we experience that process the body senses that is being destroyed by the stress hormones and it wants to stop everything to serve a hibernator or go into hiding until the stress is over what you experience is depression sometimes anxiety and aggression aggression comes up when you’re being overstressed and made to anxiety it’s all different sides of the same reaction but when your body is being damaged you get these negative emotions, aggression, anxiety and depression 23:28 that makes a lot of sense because that’s what I’m seeing in the people that have those lower you know like you mentioned testosterone, DHEA and progesterone and then higher cortisol so that makes complete sense as far as like the like you’ll hear a lot of people that in order to regulate their hormones they’re being taught like with YouTube education I call it and of course I’m on YouTube too but I’m trying to interview people like yourself that actually have valid information and valid science behind it but you hear a lot about fasting and intermittent fasting as a way of improving hormones and cortisol and I don’t buy into that and I wanted to get your opinion do you see fasting as a way to improve hormones and lower cortisol or is it actually contributing to the stress response in the body? I mean you know one day of fasting the body stores several ounces of glucose in the form of glycogen 24:32 and you can go if you’re healthy you can go up to 24 hours on your short glycogen and as the body senses stress lowering the T3 slows the rate of fuel use so when your glycogen has gone away that means you have to start using your tissue to make glucose out of your muscles and if your thyroid didn’t slow down when you have this prolonged stress or fasting situation if your thyroid didn’t drastically shut down your oxygen requirement you would eat your whole body up in just a few days but since the depressive process turns off the metabolism makes you want to hibernate 25:35 that slows the rate of degeneration of all of your organs if you at least give a little bit of glucose and minerals just some sodium chloride and or calcium magnesium and potassium during the fasting or low calorie period you can greatly reduce your tissue loss on a low calorie diet for example a person on just a water fast for 10 days they found that I think it was 80%!o(MISSING)r more of their weight loss came from destruction of their muscle and skin mass but if they had a 5 or 600 calorie diet with adequate minerals almost all of the fat weight loss was in the form of fat loss rather than muscle 26:47 so a complete fast is very destructive to the body yeah and it’s good to hear you say that because there’s a lot of misinformation out there about it so I hope people will do their own research too and look into some things about fasting before they attempt it because really fasting in a nature sense if we were out fasting that would mean we didn’t find food so it would be a stress response to the body right? yeah some of the professors when I taught at the naturopathic school were advocates of fasting and they talked about detoxifying by fasting but that got me interested in what really happens the liver is the organ of detoxification and when you’re depriving the liver of sugar and exposing it to cortisol not only does the estrogen rise but it loses its ability to detoxify other things 27:52 the reason the estrogen rises is that the salpation and glucuronidation detoxifying systems are shut down by fasting and so it’s exactly the opposite of detoxifying in Mexico I had been exposed to a type of insecticide disinfectant that they used on buses and motels for a while and it had a particular odor to it that was recognizable when I realized I was being poisoned by inhaling the fumes of this in public places I decided to leave and as I was driving home across the desert every time I got hungry I would smell this insecticide cleansing material 28:53 in my exhaled breath and for about two months after that every time I would have low blood sugar three o’clock in the morning I would wake up and smelling on my exhaled breath this pine soul insecticide odor and as soon as that odor stopped leaving my body when I got hungry then I went into a hyper thyroid state so it had been suppressing my thyroid and I was exposing myself to it I knew every time I would lower my blood sugar by mobilizing fat and so that was disturbing my liver function and thyroid and so on when you’re hungry and starving you’re living on your body tissues including fat but also your muscle 29:59 and that can mobilize the toxins that had been fairly safely stored away in animals they were careful to make sure that the animals hadn’t been exposed to insecticides or herbicides or whatever for 24 hours before slaughtering them and they sampled the various tissues the fat at the slaughterhouse was found to be full of the whatever insecticide they had been exposed to but the liver was the cleanest organ after 24 hours it had cleaned itself up and had the lowest concentration of all of the poisons the meat had the next highest concentration and the blood lower because it was constantly being detoxified by the liver 31:07 so a fast is a way to maybe clean up your liver but definitely is not good for your brain and immune system yes and the liver as far as I’m understanding is also important for things like testosterone too so you really want good liver production and detoxification just for the production of testosterone right? yeah in the case of testosterone which in a woman is produced even in greater quantities than a man produces testosterone during the premenstrual time the daily testosterone production is maybe 30 milligrams a day but the liver adapts to that very large production after two weeks of that high production 32:09 the enzymes increase and start excreting testosterone as well as estrogen and testosterone so at menstruation the synthesis of new testosterone stops and for two weeks the liver has very low exposure to testosterone meaning that it will have chance to reset its detoxifying enzymes to zero so at ovulation it’s all ready to let your body experience the full force of your testosterone if a man is supplementing testosterone every day if he exceeds the liver’s normal preference for a level of testosterone the same thing happens if he takes 30 milligrams by injection for example 33:11 the liver experiences the same thing a woman’s liver experiences with high levels of progesterone and the man throws off the testosterone very quickly so after a week or two of being exposed to high testosterone he is now excreting it very fast and probably is getting about as much estrogen effect as testosterone effect and the medical use of testosterone they sometimes give 50 or 100 milligrams at once so their liver experiences this gigantic overdose where it should be 4 or 5 milligrams per day in the young man the liver goes into a testosterone destroying condition so with regard to things like since we’re talking different diseases and stuff too 34:16 and with regard to the liver I wanted to get your thoughts on cancer and how high cortisol can play into that my mom actually died of stomach cancer at 45 and she lived a very very stressful existence both physically she was like an over-exerciser she was emotionally stressed and mentally stressed from work and hardly slept and she also starved herself quite frequently to achieve a body shape that she was looking for and I’m convinced the stress is what killed her but how in your opinion does chronically elevated cortisol and it’s related to like how is it related to things such as cancer? The low behind the rise of estrogen and cortisol in the fall of thyroid is the tissue level of stress and in the elementary canal histamine and serotonin are massively produced 35:17 95%!o(MISSING)f our serotonin in the body comes from the intestine and the semi-cultures can be produced just by an excess of serotonin and the intestine is involved in all stress but especially in prolonged ultimately carcinogenic stresses and as the histamine and serotonin increase in the digestive system that allows endotoxin and nitric oxide to rise all of those interfere with our ability to produce respiratory energy shift over to the lactic acid production and lactic acid activates the stress hormones and promotes inflammation 36:21 and lactic acid is carcinogenic in itself, it not only is produced by cancer but it promotes all of the features of cancer, inflammation, accelerated cell division and so on and the serotonin is one of the most powerful activators of the cortisol stress hormone system and it acts powerfully on the part of the hypothalamus that makes the CRH corticotropin release hormone and that is produced not only in the brain but in all of the peripheral tissues and it’s a promoter of tissue inflammation and shift of metabolism stomach cancer and intestinal cancer are very deeply involved with excess serotonin 37:30 which is really a base activator of the whole stress system it works directly on the pituitary as well as on the brain and other tissues and incidentally other tissues besides the adrenals are potential cortisol producers even our skin can make cortisol when it’s under stress so she had some pretty intense habits that led to a stress response such as sleeping maybe two or three hours a night burning the candle at both ends, she was an over thinker, over analyzer, over exerciser are there certain habits, not just foods, but certain things people are doing like just overachievers in life, people doing too much that are also creating this stress response in the body that can contribute to that loss of all those important hormones regular sleep is a power flick protective thing 38:36 it should be somewhere in the range of six to nine hours every night but the regularity is very important it becomes a built in almost a machine like regular sleep once you get a schedule set and any variation of that schedule puts the whole 24 hour cycle into a stress pattern so it isn’t just the number of hours but the regularity with which you get those hours of sleep is anti stress and high progesterone, testosterone and DHEA are promoters of restorative sleep cortisol really interferes at all levels of sleep restoration as well as daytime maintenance 39:38 and prolonged starvation for example anorexia nervosa usually it’s young women and they’ve given made MRI pictures of their brain during and then during the recovery and during the anorexia their brain especially the frontal lobes shrink and then when it repede it rebuilds itself so it’s actually causing brain damage to tasks too much and a stressful pregnancy with too much exposure to estrogen and the associated cortisol does the same thing androgen, DHEA and testosterone and progesterone protect the athlete, the brain, heart and lungs are protected by those but prolonged exposure to high estrogen even in pregnancy or in anorexia will shrink the frontal lobes of the brain that handle long range perspective 40:52 but I liked what you said about it can be rebuilt I think people aren’t aware that even if you’ve had a really strong cortisol response for a long time you’ve been in a stress response for a long time that if we can do things to mitigate that we can actually get our body back into a calm state there is a way to do that and it doesn’t have to do with taking ashwagandha and all these things there is a really safe way to do it and so can you talk about that? it’s very much like exercise but you have to stop the stress first before you can exercise effectively they know that a given activity for example taxi drivers have a bigger part of the brain that handles memory they know every street in a big city and that requires a bigger part of that brain one of my first students at the neptropathic college was a taxi driver who decided to study medicine 41:59 and she was just spectacularly able to put things together unlike the students who had just gone to college she had this global ability to perceive how things interact and that kind of exercise works best if you maintain the protective hormones it’s even supplementing pregnenolone, pertestrone, DHEA and testosterone combined with the kind of mental activity that you want to develop that will in a relatively short time rebuild and it changes your attitude learned helplessness for example from prolonged stress can be overcome 43:00 I’ve heard you talk about learned helplessness, can you expand on that a little bit for my listeners? that can be repaired with any of these protective hormones or with behavioral insight the stress process that causes you to become helpless or obsessive or over analytic or whatever stopping the stress is the first thing and that requires good nutrition good nutrition should include plenty of carbohydrates so that you don’t have to rely on the cortisol or cortisol to convert protein amino acids into glucose 44:05 and usually something more than 100 grams per day of carbohydrates preferably in the form of sucrose but it can be, if you’re very active physically, 2 or 300 grams a day of carbohydrate especially sugar can be restorative to the brain I’m so glad you brought this up because one of my next things was to talk about the dangers of sugar less diet I think people talk about the dangers of how dangerous sugar is but you actually talk about the dangers of a sugar less diet and how our body runs on glucose and therefore if you don’t take it in your body will simply make it from its own bodily tissues such as breaking down muscle like you were talking about before I think we don’t know the dangers of going sugar less actually we know too much about eating sugar but not enough about how much we actually do need to eat it 45:08 all of the things that trigger the stress hormones involve interference with glucose metabolism hypoglycemia itself is a powerful activator of the stress system excess of free fatty acids which will block the ability to use glucose will activate the stress hormones lactic acid which results when you’re not using your glucose properly it’s a sign that there’s in effect a deficiency of glucose that activates cortisol production all of these stress signs, inflammation, overexertion these require more glucose to suppress inflammation to get energy production going 46:15 so the obvious way to stop the stress reaction is to provide enough glucose and oxygen along with the other nutrients if you provide only protein and fat as your bulk nutrients you’re going to increase your cortisol just to convert the protein to the amount of glucose that your brain and blood cells need and that cortisol even though it’s being fed with protein it’s going to have all of these indirect actions that are harmful in the long run it’s going to change the way your immune system works for example as far as the glucose in your diet we know from listening to you that’s important 47:17 so that’s why on the last podcast we talked about how ketogenic and low carb diets are actually causing some of the stress response as opposed to helping with cortisol so are there certain foods, I know you’ve mentioned sugar in different forms like fructose and sucrose but are there different foods that can actually help lower cortisol and increase things like progesterone and testosterone? Yeah, the reason I talk so much about milk and orange juice is that they are the most available foods that have the most components that tend to shut down excess cortisol production lower adrenaline, reduced serotonin, nitric oxide all of the harmful mediators of inflammation and stress everyone can, with some, can find good milk and sweet orange juice and each of them has hundreds of beneficial factors 48:24 the calcium itself in milk and the minerals, potassium and the other minerals in orange juice lower these stress factors in multiple ways most people are having a borderline calcium and vitamin D deficiency in most of the world and when you’re borderline in vitamin D and calcium you increase your parathyroid hormone if you’re borderline in your mineral, especially sodium intake your aldosterone and entratensin increase these parathyroid hormone and aldosterone interact very closely and turn off your energy production, shift you over to wasting sugar 49:31 increasing your cortisol, destroying your protein eat issues so getting your aldosterone and parathyroid hormone as low as you can will at the same time increase your metabolic efficiency and so reduce your exposure to the stress hormones that’s great information, so I’m also assuming that foods that help with thyroid production would also lower a stress response in the body and therefore help with hormone production too people are being misinformed about what thyroid does it isn’t a stimulant and a catabolic hormone it is anabolic and the anabolic function goes with what should be a reduction of adrenaline and cortisol 50:35 so it is required for deep restorative sleep and relaxation doctors tell people that it’s a stimulant and a catabolic hormone exactly the opposite of truth so what foods as far as your favorite foods are pro thyroid that would help lower that stress response avoiding the polyunsaturated fats is a universal benefit as far as possible not to add for example fish oil or algae oil to your diet not to use safflower, canola oil, none of the liquid oils those are all anti-thyroid, anti-progesterone, anti-DHEA and so on 51:36 and in effect they increase your stress hormones there are the precursors for the plastic-landon like materials which amplify all of the inflammatory and stress reactions so just cutting out the polyunsaturated fats shifts you, increases your thyroid function and lowers the stress hormones so therefore that leaves us with saturated fats which I would assume are pretty good at helping to lower cortisol as well do they help increase progesterone and testosterone I guess the main goal is to lower the cortisol so that those particular hormones will rise, correct? when you are not eating the proof of polyunsaturated fats if you eat extra calories you produce the saturated fats and so your tissues will gradually, over a period of several years 52:41 gradually become more saturated if you look at the ratio of saturated fat to polyunsaturated in your tissues the saturation index corresponds to life span animals with the highest saturation index the lowest polyunsaturated fat in their tissues have the longest life expectancy and a lot of that is related to thyroid and these protective steroids wow, so I’m assuming that you’re pretty saturated then for being 82 and you are just the epitome of health and so I assume based on your diet you’re pretty saturated then, huh? I hope so I don’t eat a completely ideal diet 53:43 it takes a lab to prepare food to get rid of all of the toxic fats in the 1930s a man did it the lab intended to demonstrate that taking out all of the fat would cause a deficiency of the essential fatty acids but this guy had had lifelong headaches and blood pressure problems after I think it was three or four months on this fat-free diet he stopped having his headaches and his blood pressure normalized and as long as there was any information about him after that diet he never had a recurrence of his health problems so far from producing deficiency diseases this extreme laboratory-defined fat-free diet cured his lifelong health problems 54:51 wow, that’s incredible so there is some validity to watching your fat intake and making sure that you have good glucose intake and so where does protein fit into all this? what are your favorite sources of protein for lowering cortisol and increasing those hormones we’ve been talking about like progesterone and testosterone and DHA? gelatin happens to be fairly close to an ideal protein for an adult milk protein has a fair amount of tryptophan, cysteine, and these are pro-inflammatory amino acids that are used in growth milk is ideal for growing and has anti-inflammatory, anti-stress factors but for an adult I think it should be supplemented with something like gelatin as an extra protein 55:58 which lacks the pro-inflammatory growth related amino acids so that’s interesting so you could almost do like a blend your morning coffee with a little collagen gelatin and some milk and make almost like a little protein smoothie that way with a little coffee, huh? yeah, I use about eight or nine ounces of milk with an ounce or two of extremely concentrated coffee for my breakfast meal you sound like an espresso lover that sounds like a concentrated coffee that’s an espresso and that’s what I love too yeah, you don’t get an excess of water that way yes, that’s true well, Dr. Pete, I could go on and on and on but I know that you are getting ready to work on your next newsletter and so I want to touch on that a little bit I want to let people know that they can actually sign up for your newsletter which is amazing and they can sign up via to receive it through the mail or also through email 57:03 and it’s $28 I believe for email the newsletter and then it’s $38 to get it through the mail yeah, and that’s for 12 issues by monthly so it’s for two years all the issues yeah, and they can do that by emailing raypeatsnewsletter.com and I’ll have all that information in the show notes as well and I also want to encourage you guys to go check out all of his articles at raypeat.com because that’s where you’re really going to get just a cornucopia of information that will just blow your socks off so Dr. Pete, I just so appreciate your time I love, love, love talking with you and sorry we had a little connection issues today but I really will take any part of you that I can get so I appreciate your time today okay, thank you and you guys stay tuned for more hopefully next time we can talk about the thyroid a little bit more Dr. Pete if that’s okay with you okay okay, sounds good 58:04 thanks everybody for listening, bye for now